The man who helped the United States establish friendly relations with China in the 1970s now says he is alarmed by escalating tensions between the two countries.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 97, is calling for the U.S. and China to establish rules of engagement for their rising competition on the global stage or risk leading into a blowup similar to World War I.
“Our leaders and [China’s] leaders have to discuss the limits beyond which they will not push threats,” Kissinger said on Wednesday during a virtual discussion hosted by the Economic Club of New York. “They have to find a way of conducting such a policy over an extended period of time … You can say this is totally impossible, and if it’s totally impossible, we will slide into a situation similar to World War I.”
Kissinger is recognized with establishing relations between Communist China and the U.S. while he served under President Richard Nixon. He helped open up trade with the country and laid the groundwork for Nixon’s historic weeklong visit to Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai in 1972.
Kissinger said the reasoning for opening relations with China was in hopes of gaining strategic dominance over the Soviet Union, which geographically neighbored China to the north and west.
Though the coronavirus pandemic has worsened already tense relations between China and the U.S., Kissinger said in 2019, before the outbreak of the virus, that tensions were getting to levels “in the foothills of a cold war” and could lead to conflict even greater than World War I.
“If conflict is permitted to run unconstrained, the outcome could be even worse than it was in Europe,” Kissinger said. “World War I broke out because a relatively minor crisis could not be mastered.”
In a recent interview, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended the Trump administration’s tough policies toward China, noting that the administration has worked to reverse decades of leadership toward the nation.
He said the administration is reversing the policies first enacted under the Nixon administration, disagreeing with how Kissinger and Nixon approached China.
“We were pushing back against essentially 50 years of U.S. policy with respect to China, since Nixon and Kissinger had gone to Beijing back in the early 1970s, where there was the theory of the case was if we just do more business with them, if we open up, they’ll become less hostile, less hegemonic in their desires, and less authoritarian internally. That failed,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo said the best way to fight China’s global rise is to identify it as a threat, which he said the administration has been successful at doing.
